Friday, 1 April 2016

Ignoring The Indefensible War On Yemen

The New York Timeseditorsexpresshope
that a proposed cease-fire in Yemen might hold:Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to meet soon
with foreign ministers of gulf Arab nations. If he can make sure they go
forward with the cease-fire, there may be a chance of ending a conflict that
has slaughtered civilians, tarnished America’s standing and diverted resources
from fighting the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.Yemen desperately needs a halt to the fighting, but
beyond that it needs the coalition blockade to end.If there is a cease-fire
but no lifting of the blockade, the civilian population will continue to suffer
from preventable starvation and disease and the provision of humanitarian aid
will be significantly hindered as it has been for the last year.As long as the
blockade remains in place, the Saudis and their allies will be inflicting
enormous harm on the people of Yemen.The country is also going to require
enormous aid in rebuilding the infrastructure that has been demolished over the
last year.The U.S. and Britain are partly responsible for the wrecking of the
country and ought to contribute significantly to helping Yemen recover, but I’m
skeptical that either government will accept responsibility for what they have
done there.Ideally, the Saudis and their allies would be required to pay for
the damage they have caused, but we know that’s not going to happen.Saudi Arabia and its allies made a horrendous decision to
intervene a year ago, and the Obama administration made a disgraceful decision
to support them.The administration did this even when they had every reason to
expect that the intervention would fail on its own terms, which it did.One of
the more sickening things about this war is that almost everyone except the
coalition governments could foresee that it would be a disaster for Yemen and
the region, and many people said as much when it began, but the Saudis and
their allies plowed ahead anyway.It was a completely unnecessary war, but they
intervened regardless.The U.S. provided weapons, fuel, and intelligence to
help the coalition wage the war, which both enabled the intervention and
encouraged the Saudis and their allies to continue fighting.The U.S. has not
only helped the coalition to bomb Yemen, but by providing diplomatic cover for
their war crimes and withholding criticism of their tactics the administration
has made it easier for the Saudis and their allies to get away with numerous violations
of international law and to commit more war crimes as the war drags on.The
administration has done more than just “tarnish America’s standing” by doing
this.They have made the U.S. complicit in the war crimes of Washington’s
despotic clients, and to make matters worse they have done all this for
nothing.No U.S. interests have been served by this campaign, and it has
arguably made both the U.S. and the region less secure by allowing Al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to grow stronger.Had the Saudis and their allies not intervened, Yemen
would almost certainly still be suffering from internal conflict, but the
conflict would be a less destructive one.There would be fewer people displaced
from their homes, the resulting humanitarian crisis would be less severe, and
it would have been easier for aid groups and outside governments to provide aid
to the civilian population.The outside intervention by the Saudis and their
allies took every serious problem Yemen already had and made it much worse, it
has clearly intensified the conflict while also making it more difficult to
end, and it has achieved none of its goals while putting millions of lives at
risk from famine and disease.While the interventionmay
not technically be illegal because Yemen’s recognized government supports it,
it is wrong and unjustifiable in every other way.

It seems incredible that such a thoroughly indefensible
military campaign has generated so little outrage and has gone mostly unnoticed
outside the region, but unfortunately the lack of attention and reaction is not
all that surprising. Most Western media outlets have paid almost no attention
to the war, and when there is some coverage the conflict is usually presented
with the misleading framing of a Saudi-Iranian proxy war when Iran has little
to do with any of what has happened.There have been several good pieces
published in the last week to mark the anniversary of the start of the
intervention, but during most other weeks it’s as if the war isn’t even
happening.Here in the U.S., the reflexive hawkish tendency to side
with “allies” ensures that the administration’s domestic opponents don’t care
about what the Saudis are doing, and the partisan impulse to refrain from
attacking one’s own side keeps most (but not all) Democrats from criticizing
U.S. support for the war. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy is one of the very few
honorable exceptions. “Humanitarian” interventionists typically say nothing
about humanitarian disasters when the governments responsible for them are on
“our” side, and their total silence about this conflict proves that. Republicans that would normally seize on any chance to fault Obama for foreign
policy incompetence don’t care what happens to people in Yemen, so it probably
never occurs to them to object to the administration’s position. It hasn’t
helped that the war has coincided with our election season, since that means
there are even fewer resources than usual devoted to covering news from
overseas, but all of these other factors help explain why the war has never
come up once in any debate and almost none of the candidates has addressed it
even in passing. The Obama administration pretends that the U.S. isn’t a
party to the conflict when it clearly is, and with a few exceptions members of
Congress don’t challenge the policy and don’t question the decision to back the
Saudi-led coalition. Journalists write wide-ranging essays on Obama’s foreign
policy, but U.S. involvement in the war never comes up. Hawks are so dedicated
to the fiction that Obama “abandons” allies and clients that they would rather
fault Obama for doing too little to help the Saudis than to question the U.S.
role in the first place. Many Obama supporters have grown so used to cutting
the president slack on bad foreign policy choices because of his unreasonable
hawkish critics that they have practically forgotten how to judge his foreign
policy decisions on the merits. The result is that the war is rarely talked
about and the U.S. role in it is mentioned even less often, and so the
administration receives virtually no scrutiny or criticism for one of its most
egregious and damaging blunders.